Case Study · Federal Government / Healthcare · 5 years
Veterans Health Administration
Engineer precise, fully usable test patient records for VA and Cerner testing teams — encoding complex clinical and eligibility conditions in VistA/CPRS and generating records at scale with Eggplant automation.
The challenge
The biggest challenge facing our VA and Cerner clients is obtaining test patient records that are accurate, concise, and usable for their testing needs. Customers usually do not have the in-depth knowledge to create test patient records with the exact conditions and attributes needed for a specific test — for example, Service Connected or Non-Service Connected status, a particular veteran insurance plan, specific clinical conditions, medication assignments, radiology and surgery requests, or what it means to be a Humanitarian patient at a VA facility.
How we do it
Our team creates test patient records based on the complex requirements provided by the requesting testing team, delivering exactly what they need to successfully and accurately test the conditions they must verify and validate.
Often the requester does not know precisely what to ask for — and that is where our team's expertise comes in. We review what they have asked for and work together to come up with a solution that fits their testing needs, providing complete patient records with all the required attributes (for example, a patient who is 100% service connected with a special authority of Agent Orange, or a non-service-connected patient with higher income who must pay copays for visits and prescriptions).
Deep knowledge of the VistA system allows us to know exactly which combination of attributes is needed to complete a patient record to the satisfaction of the requesting team — knowledge generally outside the skill set of internal VA and Cerner testers, gained from many years working on VistA and refined through team brainstorming on complex records.
Solutions & technologies
Beyond personal knowledge and experience of the systems, the team uses Eggplant — an automation tool that can generate many test patient records at a time. Completed records flow to a SharePoint app where requesters can search for their request number. VistA and CPRS are used to register and enroll test patients and configure their health-plan conditions and financial information for accurate billing and adjudication. Application domain: EHR (Electronic Health Records).
Solutions used
- Eggplant
- VistA
- CPRS
- SharePoint